Computer crash leads to lockdown at both jails

The Denver Sheriff Department was forced to lock down both jails Tuesday night after a computer system crash made it difficult to keep track of inmates.

Deputies resorted to creating paper records of the people being booked into the Downtown Detention Center.

The computer failure also led Sheriff Patrick Firman to ask the Denver Police Department to hold detainees in lockup cells at the six district police stations for an hour. They later were taken to the downtown jail and placed temporarily in a DUI holding room under the supervision of a police officer.

Officers patrolling the streets were not allowed to drop off people they had arrested for nearly three hours, Firman said.

Adding to the stress of the night, four people waiting to be booked into the jail shared Xanax tablets that one man had hidden in his crotch, Firman said. All four were taken to Denver Health Medical Center for observation, he said.

“There was not a lot of chaos,” said Firman, who ordered pizza to help ease the staff’s stress. “Our staff did a phenomenal job of handling this.”

The department and city staff had scheduled a computer system upgrade from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, said Scott Cardenas, Denver’s chief information officer.

At 4 p.m. the upgrade was not finished, and the two agencies decided to extend the process for an hour. By 5 p.m. the upgrade still was not complete, Cardenas said.

Because the jail gets busier at night and inmates are logged and tracked via the computer system, staff members from technology services and the sheriff’s department decided to restore the old system. However, some data was lost in the shift and deputies were forced to begin manually entering information about inmates that had been collected during the previous 5½ hours, Firman said.

“We had a paper process we go to,” Firman said.

The data gap could have created serious problems for the sheriff’s department, which routinely counts inmates during the course of the day as people are booked and released or transferred between the downtown and county jails. The computer system also helps deputies figure out where to house inmates based on information such as gang affiliation and criminal and medical histories.

To make sure every inmate was accounted for, Firman said he ordered the lock downs at both jails and froze inmate movement. The lock down lasted from 6:40 to 9:48 p.m., Firman said.

“The most efficient way to handle that is to do a lock down count,” he said. “Without the computer system, it’s hard to go through all of that. That’s why we do the freeze order so we’re not moving people around.”

The computer system was restored around midnight, Cardenas said. By Wednesday morning, the backlog of people waiting to be booked into the jail had been erased, Firman said.

While Firman said the department was prepared to handle the computer outage and the lock down, others disagreed.

Mike Jackson, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Denver Sheriff Lodge #27, said, “It was not handled well.” He did not elaborate as to why the union disagreed with the sheriff’s assessment of what happened.

The inmates taken to Denver Health after they ingested Xanax were returned to the jail, Firman said. He said they were driven to the hospital in a department van as a precaution.

Deputies caught the drug exchange when they saw a man and a woman kissing as they leaned over a railing that divides inmates of different genders in the intake area, Firman said. They learned the man had passed drugs to the woman, who had swallowed two pills. They also learned that a second woman and another man also had accepted pills.

“That incident would have happened regardless of what else was going on,” Firman said.